HiIs it good or bad SEO practice to put a list of links to your site's pages in the footer. Not keyword stuffing or repeating links, just a basic menu/ sitemap really.I would've thought it's good for UX and SEO but can't find anything to confirm this.Thanks

Stevie_D
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2013-01-30T21:17:45Z —
#2

qwaerstd said:

Is it good or bad SEO practice to put a list of links to your site's pages in the footer. Not keyword stuffing or repeating links, just a basic menu/ sitemap really.I would've thought it's good for UX and SEO but can't find anything to confirm this.

Links in your footer don't get a lot of attention from Googlebot and its friends.

Search engines are interested in the links that you want real people to follow, because those are the pages that you're visibly and actively promoting from your site. Footer links don't come into that. The reason that you've put those links in the footer is because you're not all that bothered about people seeing them ... they are there if people are looking for them (and when people are looking for things like T&Cs, contact page, sitemap and so on, they usually know to look at the bottom of the page), but they aren't up front and shouting to get people's attention. So if you don't think they are worth putting front and centre for real people, why would search engines be bothered?

For standard pages like T&Cs and the sitemap, that is the most appropriate place for them. Google understands what T&C and sitemap pages are, it knows under what circumstances to put them in the SERPs, and it knows how to use the sitemap to spider and index the rest of the site. But it also knows that, most of the time, it isn't going to be the right page to show to people – the home page or other content pages are going to serve them (and you) much better.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't have footer links – far from it, they are a useful and common design feature – but don't expect them to confer a whole lot of googlelove on the pages you link to from the footer.

qwaerstd
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2013-01-30T23:11:40Z —
#3

Nice answer, thanks.

dvduval
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2013-01-31T00:24:00Z —
#4

Sadly, I am aware of multiple situations online right now where someone bought a footer link on a pagerank 7 or 8 site and that pagerank passed to the other site and they too have a pagerank 7 or 8. They are also getting traffic and rankings on the site. Google is not policing this enough and there is still plenty of black hat stuff going on where people are making thousands off of pagerank. I don't recommend this, but I know of a dozen sites where they make tons of money on this.

seoexperttools
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2013-01-31T02:28:55Z —
#5

Links in footer certainly have their own use in SEO, however, they are not as effective as the ones in the side or in the content. And as someone already pointed out above, footer links might sometime ignored by some search engines, including Google. If you are going to pay for link in the footer then it might not worth it.

shawnirwin
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2013-01-31T05:39:30Z —
#6

A single link hyperlinked with the keyword is not bad.But when more number of links are being used in the footer, it becomes a bad one.

nasirshaikh
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2013-01-31T10:56:23Z —
#7

no it is not good. some times google crawler cant reach to the end of the page. you can use it on first or second paragraph would be the best.

molona
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2013-01-31T12:33:42Z —
#8

nasirshaikh said:

no it is not good. some times google crawler cant reach to the end of the page. you can use it on first or second paragraph would be the best.

Who said that the crowler can't reach to the end of the page?

In the old times, crowlers did have a limit on the amount of words or bytes that they could save but these limits, if they still exit, are more than enough to reach the end of the page. Unless you have so much html garbage... then it wouldn't be only the crowler but the users who would not read the page due to major loading times. They will get bored and leave

nasirshaikh
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2013-01-31T14:15:19Z —
#9

if page contains so many outbound links, there should be a chance google crawler cant reach to the end of page

molona
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2013-01-31T15:05:24Z —
#10

nasirshaikh said:

if page contains so many outbound links, there should be a chance google crawler cant reach to the end of page